In “Annabel Lee” he made the very angels heroes of the green-room: Her highborn kinsmen came And bore her away from me. On the other hand, Poe’s theatricalism, though it explains some of the faults of his poetry, leaves unexplained the fact that he has cast a greater spell on succeeding poets than has even so great a theatrical genius as Byron. Poe is one of those poets who are sources of poetry. He discovered--though not without forerunners such as Coleridge--a new borderland for the imagination, where death and despair had a new strangeness. He seems to have reached it, not through mere fancy, as his imitators do, but through experience. When he was a youth he worshipped Mrs. Helen Stannard, the mother of one of his friends. She went mad and died, and for some time after her death Poe used to haunt her tomb by night, and “when the autumnal rains fell and the winds wailed mournfully over the graves, he lingered longest, and came away most regretfully.” J. H. Ingram and other writers have found in these “solitary churchyard vigils” the clue to “much that seems strange and abnormal in the poet’s after life.” Love overshadowed by death, beauty overshadowed by death, remained the recurrent theme of his verse. It is the theme of his supreme poem, “Annabel Lee,” with its haunting close: In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea. Poe was a poet for whom life was darkened by experience and illuminated only by visions. In the beginning, romance loves to nod and sing With drowsy head and painted wing, Among the green leaves as they shake Far down within some shadowy lake. In time, however, this born day-dreamer can find no comfort in day-dreaming: Of late, eternal Condor years So shake the very Heaven on high With tumult as they thunder by, I have no time for idle cares Through gazing on the unquiet sky. And when an hour with calmer wings Its down upon my spirit flings-- That little time with lyre and rhyme To while away--forbidden things!-- My heart would feel to be a crime Unless it trembled with the strings. There is a terrible sincerity in Poe’s sense of the presence of death. His vision of mortal men, at least, was not theatrical in its gloom: Mimes, in the form of God on high, Mutter and mumble low, And hither and thither fly-- Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible Woe!